News for Digital Journalists

Posts tagged with: Grants

Spend July 11-16 at USC Annenberg School of Journalism exploring the intersection between community health, health policy and the nation’s growing ethnic diversity—as well as the role that factors such as race, ethnicity, pollution, violence, and transportation, land-use and food policy play in prospects for good health. Return home with new story ideas, sources, and a thorough grounding in the principles and practice of good health journalism. Plus, you’ll have funds to pursue a substantive health-related reporting project…

Fellowships are open to print, broadcast, and online journalists from around the country.

Applicants must join ReportingonHealth.org, an online community for health journalism and the official Web site for the Fellowships. To encourage collaboration between mainstream and ethnic media, preference will be given to applicants who propose a joint project for use by both media outlets.

A new experimental fund will help journalists in the Greater Philadelphia region develop public affairs stories and demonstrate the possibilities for collaborative newsgathering and distribution.

The Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Fund will award ten $5,000 grants to support reporting projects. This program is funded by the William Penn Foundation and administered by J-Lab (a project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation). J-Lab recommended establishing this fund in an April 2010 report.

Here’s what’s eligible, and how to apply…

According to J-Lab, eligible projects must:

Focus on the City of Philadelphia and the eight-county Greater Philadelphia Region. (Harrisburg- and Trenton-based projects focused on the Philadelphia region also are eligible.)

Foster an open exchange of journalistically sound information.

Include enterprise reporting that involves investigative or explanatory journalism, watchdog or accountability journalism, or computer-assisted reporting.

Enhance public understanding of important city or regional issues

Engage in solutions around public affairs problems and/or reveal new information.

If you’re a reporter investigating issues in your state or local community, or are working on investigative stories for ethnic media, you could be eligible for a boost from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Grants range from $500 to $10,000, and the organization can also provide guidance on reporting and advice on placement, as well as mentoring with veteran journalists through a partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Bring home one of these grants. The Knight Foundation will again accept applications for the Knight Community Information Challenge from Jan. 17 to March 7, 2011. So start talking now to local community foundations—you might find a partner foundation willing to contribute funds, and Knight will match their contribution.

In addition, foundation leaders can register for Knight’s fourth annual Media Learning Seminar—a gathering to discuss how foundations can support local news and information needs and opportunities. Feb. 28 - March 1, 2011, Miami.

$10 million in new grants will allow the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism to offer the first Master of Arts degree in Entrepreneurial Journalism—and do much more to further the burgeoning field of entrepreneurial journalism…

This two-year program will add business training and research to CUNY’s existing masters in journalism. Students will be trained to launch their own enterprises or work within traditional media companies.

CUNY recently received a $3 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and another $3 million from The Tow Foundation of Wilton, Conn. Additional funding is coming from the McCormick, MacArthur, and Carnegie foundations—as well as in-kind contributions of staff and technology from the CUNY J-School.

Are you a female journalist with a good idea for an innovative, self-sustaining digital news media initiative? Then apply for one of three $20,000 grants from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Here’s how…

Eligible proposals must:

be from women journalists.

use digital media in innovative ways to deliver news.

include a business plan that demonstrates sustainability.

demonstrate how projects further the role of women in the news media.

In addition to grants, this program offers ongoing support in the form of free coaching from experts on how to turn ideas into viable business ventures.

Another $3 million will go to journalism projects in other countries, with a separate partnership to be announced next year, said Google’s Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development.

Mashable‘s Vadim Lavrusik suggested a rationale for the sizeable contribution to digital journalism—“In part, it is policy for Google to donate 1% of profits toward charity, but it’s also a peace offering of sorts to news organizations that have often blamed their woes on the technology giant.”

Knight President Alberto IbargŁen called Google “the right partner” in the foundation’s ongoing efforts to foster experiments for providing news and information via digital platforms. In a video statement, IbargŁen called the move by Google to support Knight’s efforts “huge ... The Google contribution brings this to a whole other level. It’s not just the size of it, which is considerable. But it’s the endorsement from the industry leader.”

Added Knight’s Director of New Media John Bracken, on a Knightblog post: “It’s a good day when the biggest company on the Internet tells you that they admire your work. The only thing better is when they tell you they back up the compliment with millions of dollars to help expand your work.”

In Florida, civic engagement hasn’t been doing so well. The state has been ranked 34th nationally in average voter turnout, 48th in public meeting attendance and 49th in volunteering.

To help reverse this dire trend, today the John S. and James L. Knight foundation announced it’s awarding a $3 million grant to encourage civic commitment among students at the University of Florida with the help of digital media…

The Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the university will use the fund to launch “novel programs” including:

Knight Effective Citizenship Fellows, who will do research to develop best practices in encouraging a lifelong civic engagement.

Civil Debate Wall, a high-tech media center that will allow students to instantly engage in debate and conversation on issues. The wall will anchor a series of interactive kiosks both on and off campus that will poll students on their views, and present them with opposing opinions on issues.

Rethinking Citizenship, an interactive online course that will teach students civic engagement on the local, state and national levels. The curriculum will be reviewed by a panel of experts and scholars.

Series of live forums and panel discussions that will use live streaming, multimedia imagery, and social media tools to link students and scholars in public policy discussions around the world.

News organizations also can play a strong role in fostering local civic engagements. For ideas and resources on how to accomplish this (even with limited time or means), see KDMC’s civic engagement series.

News entrepreneurs are finding that support can come in many ways that news organizations traditionally have not explored—including partnering with community foundations…

If you would like to launch a local news or information venue or project, now is the time to find a community or place-based foundation willing to support your project. Then have your foundation partner apply for the Knight Community Information Challenge. This five-year grant contest from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation designed to engage community and place-based foundations in meeting local information needs.

Applicants must be a US community or place-based foundation. Projects must meet a local information need, and the local foundation must match Knight’s investment.

Two leading new nonprofit news organizations have just received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to develop a free open-source publishing platform. The goal of this software, to be jointly developed by the Texas Tribune and the Bay Citizen, is to help other online news organizations engage readers, manage content, and earn revenue…

According to Knight: “At the first Knight Foundation gathering of news startups in Austin last spring, organizations revealed their struggles to find a publishing platform that is low-cost to implement, while flexible enough to allow constant innovation in content delivery, audience engagement and fundraising.”

Matt Waite, principle developer of Politifact and now a journalism instructor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, tweeted this reaction: “The Knight announcement today is a real opportunity. It’s a CMS with the benefits of a framework. ...It has a generic content model you can inherit and extend all you want, seamlessly integrated.”

The platform, which includes a content management system, will:

Manage an integrated library of text, video and audio files.

Maximize search engine optimization by improving the way articles are linked, aggregated and tagged.

Better integrate sites with social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as bloggers.

It will be interesting to see whether this effort will draw upon the large code base and developer networks for existing popular free open-source content management systems such as Drupal and WordPress. Those platforms are already widely used by many news startups, and they’ve attracted substantial module collections and developer communities. New platforms that are built completely from scratch sometimes languish due to a small developer pool and sparse module offerings.

Also, it’ll be interesting to see how easy it might be for existing news sites that have already committed to other platforms to integrate with, or switch to, this new one.